Immersive arts have different entry points and equally varied aesthetic outcomes. At this stage, the maturity of the medium allows for the identification of its original instances and trajectories. Craig Quintero, now a stable and prominent presence at Venice Immersive, enters immersive art through theater, as the director of the Riverbed Theatre company in Taipei. Approaching XR through the performing arts is different from approaching it through video games – two distinct entry points among many possible ones, each leading to very specific expressive and aesthetic results. These results are promising for a medium – or rather, a new ecosystem of technologies and languages – that, over the past decade, has sown much in fallow ground, with uneven harvests. Quintero has a precise, clear vision. This is evident not only in the clarity of the 360° images he meticulously crafts with Kubrickian precision, but especially in his aesthetic choices.
The triptych that concludes with A Simple Silence, the piece competing this year at Venice Immersive, thrives on the imagination of a director who has progressively and intentionally breached the boundaries of theater and the performing arts in a masterful play of proximity, connections, and urgent calls to the living presence of the spectator – flesh, bodies, and dreams. His immersive theater unfolds entirely in a dreamlike, intrapsychic space, where a kind of montage of attractions gives the 360° video a new sense it never had before. There are no abrupt cross-cuts, but rather cohesive and coherent spaces, designed with one eye on theater and its fixity, and the other on cinema. The images possess remarkable plastic coherence, resulting in an enchanted experience, suspended in a hypnagogic state where the symbolic prevails over the objective referent. Entries, exits, movements, gazes, appearances: everything in A Simple Silence is delightfully simple yet conceptually complex. Like the best works of art, where a miraculous aesthetic balance marks a linguistic evolution from which there is no turning back.
A SIMPLE SILENCE
by Craig Quintero (Taipei, 12’)
